| Contents |
To Kurt Martens, 12 July 1902 -- To Kurt Martens, 16 October 1902 -- From 'Notes', 24 December 1905 -- From 'An essay on the theatre', 1908 -- From 'Mind and art', 1909-12 -- To Walter Opitz, 26 August 1909 -- 'Coming to terms with Richard Wagner', July 1911 -- To Ernst Bertram, 11 August 1911 -- To Julius Bab, 14 September 1911 -- From Reflections of a Non-political Man, 1918 -- To Ernst Bertram, 4 June 1920 -- To Paul Steegemann, 18 August 1920 -- Tristan and Isolde (film scenario), 1923 -- On the film scenario of Tristan und Isolde, October 1924 -- To Josef Ponten, 21 January 1925 -- To Hans Pfitzner, 23 June 1925 -- A facsimile score of Tristan und Isolde, October 1925 -- From 'What do you owe to the notion of cosmopolitanism?', October 1925 -- To an opera producer, 15 November 1927 -- 'Ibsen and Wagner', March 1928 -- From 'Recollections of the Stadttheater', 1930 -- 'Wagner and the present age', August 1931 -- To Walter Opitz, 20 January 1933 -- To Ernst Bertram, 26 February 1933 -- 'The sorrows and grandeur of Richard Wagner', April 1933 -- 'A protest from Richard Wagner's own city of Munich', 16/17 April 1933 -- Reply to the 'Protest from Richard Wagner's own city of Munich', 19 April 1933 -- To Willi Schuh, 21 April 1933 -- Reply to Hans Pfitzner, July 1933 -- To Rene Schickele, 16 May 1934 -- To Karl Vossler, 4 May 1935 -- To Willi Schuh, 28 June 1936 -- To Stefan Zweig, 14 November 1937 -- 'Richard Wagner and Der Ring des Nibelungen', November 1937 -- From 'Schopenhauer, 1938 -- To Karl Kerenyi, 6 December 1938 -- From an Introduction to Anna Karenina, 1939 -- To the editor of Common Sense, January 1940 -- To Agnes E. Meyer, 18 February 1942 -- To Agnes E. Meyer, 5 May 1942 -- To Agnes E. Meyer, 27 August 1943 -- 'My favorite records', 30 October 1948 -- From The Genesis of 'Doctor Faustus', 1949 -- To Emil Preetorius, 6 December 1949 -- 'Richard Wagner's letters', January 1951 -- To Friedrich Schramm, 25 August 1951. |
| Abstract |
This volume brings together Thomas Mann's reflections of a lifetime on the composer to whom he felt closest. The novelist's admiration for Wagner was, however, by no means uncritical. Following Nietzsche, Mann knew that one had a duty to be both 'pro and contra Wagner'--hence the title of this collection. Its centrepiece, 'The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner', is one of the most revealing essays on the composer ever written. Delivered as a lecture in Munich within two weeks of Hitler having become Chancellor, Mann's blasphemous view of Wagner's art as 'dilettantism raised to the level of genius', was the immediate cause of his long exile from German soil. This and the other major essay in the book (on the Ring) have long been out of print. They are presented here in wholly new translations which capture more faithfully than previous renderings the tone and literary distinction of the original texts. The forty-four other items, written between 1902 and 1951, include many which have never before been available in English. As Erich Heller says in his introduction, these incomparable writings are 'an essential fragment of the novelist's intellectual autobiography.' |
